Links for October 31 2010

Quote: In a recent presentation, Lew Cirne, CEO of application performance management vendor New Relic (it’s an anagram), revealed the company now has 5,000 customers and just one sales rep. That’s astonishing. Cirne points out that there’s a new class of customers for whom “there is no reason whatsoever for application performance management to be sold by a direct sales force.” If you’re building a cloud-based application on top of a standard Ruby, .Net or Java stack, much of the complexity has been factored out already, enabling a much simpler self-service sales model.

Quote: Process improvement programs that do not expressly target competitive advantage are doomed to fail. This may sound like common sense, but it happens far too frequently. Process improvement zealots often warn senior managers of the need to continually assess and improve processes everywhere in the organization. They project a religious and indiscriminate tone that can lead to improving the wrong activities and ignoring the ones that matter.

Quote: So it actually all comes down to this – my prospects and clients need to understand when the “right” time for innovation is. After all, what we usually hear from executives is that “this isn’t the right time” for innovation. Not that they don’t want innovation, or don’t need innovation, or that innovation is too risky or expensive. No, the usual response is that this simply isn’t the “right” time.

Quote: Microsoft recently announced that Ray Ozzie, its Chief Software Architect and a sage of the high tech world, is leaving the company. On his way out the door, he wrote a public memo titled “Dawn of a New Day”. I believe the scenario he presents in the memo is important enough to place it alongside other famous, game-changing documents, such as Bill Gates’ “The Internet Tidal Wave” memo from 1995, which set the direction for Microsoft for the next 15 years.

Quote: I have always believed that you are more likely to accomplish big goals if you declare them publicly. My rationale has been that this creates the accountability you need to follow-through. But now I am not so sure.

Quote: IT spends a lot of time trying to improve our system and the user interface, especially when they will be used by our external customers. Most of the time, we’re pretty good at delivering easy-to-use applications. However, I recently came across two examples of how our systems can impact customer perception even when the customer doesn’t use them, or when it is a minor utility application.

Quote: What if we asked how much is your brand worth to a fan, instead? Not so much in terms of what you can make people do. More about what people are inspired and attracted to be as a result of their association with a brand, use of a product or a service.

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About Eric

Eric D. Brown, D.Sc. is a technology and marketing consultant with an interest in using technology and data to solve real-world business problems. In recent years, he has combined sentiment analysis, natural language processing and big data approaches to build innovative systems and strategies to solve interesting problems. In addition, he is an entrepreneur and has recently launched Trade The Sentiment, a website/service for using Twitter Sentiment in trading and investing. He also likes to take photographs when he can.

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About Eric

Dr. Brown received his Doctor of Science in Information Systems in 2014 with a dissertation titled "Analysis of Twitter Messages for Sentiment and Insight for use in Stock Market Decision Making". His research interests are currently in the areas of decision support, data science, big data, natural language processing, sentiment analysis and social media analysis.In recent years, he has combined sentiment analysis, natural language processing and big data approaches to build innovative systems and strategies to solve interesting problems.

In addition, he is an entrepreneur and launched a few companies with the most recent being a company focused on proving data analytics and visualization services.